A former editor for Forbes and the Financial Times, Eamonn Fingleton spent 27 years monitoring East Asian economics from a base in Tokyo. In September 1987 he issued the first of several predictions of the Tokyo banking crash and went on in "Blindside," a controversial 1995 analysis that was praised by John Kenneth Galbraith and Bill Clinton, to show that a heedless America was fast losing its formerly vaunted leadership in advanced manufacturing -- and particularly in so-called producers' goods -- to Japan.
His 1999 book "In Praise of Hard Industries: Why Manufacturing, Not the Information Economy, Is the Key to Future Prosperity" anticipated the American Internet stock crash of 2000 and offered an early warning about the abuse of new financial instruments.
In his 2008 book "In the Jaws of the Dragon: America’s Fate in the Coming Era of Chinese Hegemony," he challenged the conventional view that China is converging to Western economic and political values.
His books have been translated into French, Russian, Korean, Japanese, and Chinese. They have been read into the U.S. Senate record and named among the ten best business books of the year by Business Week and Amazon.com.

Jeff Bezos: time for a little quality control at his media acquisition. (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)

American newspapers have long been notorious for the credulousness of their foreign correspondents. But even by the American press’s normal standards, the Washington Post excelled itself the other day. Its Tokyo correspondent, Max Fisher, reported in all seriousness that the Japanese are not getting enough sex.

He added: “This is more than a story about Japan and its cultural quirks: It’s a story about the global economy….. The Japanese economy is in serious enough trouble that it could set the rest of us back. And the biggest source of that trouble is demographic: Japanese people aren’t having enough kids to sustain a healthy economy. One big reason they’re having fewer kids is that they’re not as interested in dating or marrying one another, in part because they’re less interested in sex.”

The mind boggles. How does Max Fisher know what is going on in Japanese bedrooms? How for that matter does anyone? Research on people’s sexual behavior is notoriously unreliable even in the West, let alone in Japan, where special cultural factors get in the way of the facts.

True, the Japanese birth rate is low. But this is hardly a problem in a world whose finite resources are increasingly stretched — and a world moreover where the real problems are in nations like India and Pakistan with high birthrates. (Although for more than a decade now Japan’s population has been gently falling, suggestions that this creates a problem of inadequate net demand for the global economy are economic illiteracy: the point is that a falling population means less aggregate supply as well as less aggregate demand and the two effects can be expected to balance out.)

In any case Japan’s low birthrate is not news. It has been low since the 1950s, yet no one has ever produced convincing evidence that this stems from some mysterious lack of interest in sex. As the Bloomberg columnist William Pesek has pointed out, the idea that the Japanese have suddenly developed some strange aversion to sex – the first sighting of such an aversion in the history not only of the human race but of all vertebrates! – is contradicted by a mass of easily verified data. How, for instance, does Fisher square his conclusion with the observation (not mentioned in his report, of course) that extensive districts of Japanese cities are given over to by-the-hour “love hotels”?

Fisher’s article was a follow-up to one in the Observer, a low-budget British weekly. As various commentators have pointed out (notably Joshua Keating here and Brian Ashcraft here), the Observer substantially garbled Japanese statistics that themselves looked highly questionable.

Any attempt to explain Japan’s birth rate might usefully start, not with sensational assertions about the unknowable, but with some easily verified facts.

There is, for instance, the fact that Japanese women, in common with sophisticated women elsewhere in the world, are known to favor small families. As Pesek records, the Czech Republic, Poland, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, and Taiwan all have birth rates broadly as low as Japan’s. He adds: “I don’t see the global media characterizing those countries as sexless freak shows spiraling toward extinction.”

Another fact is that Japanese people almost starved to death in the immediate wake of World War II. The crisis inspired the government to pass the Eugenic Protection Act of 1948, the world’s first governmental measure to reduce a nation’s population. In this sense it was a forerunner of China’s one-child policy. Indeed Japan’s food security problem is far greater than China’s in that the ratio of arable land per head of population is little more than one-third of China’s.

The Eugenic Protection Act paved the way for a highly successful program to popularize birth control. Ever afterwards the Japanese government has used a variety of means, not least its control over the media, to build a climate of opinion in favor of small families. As Pesek has pointed out, another factor pressuring Japanese couples to have small families is an acute shortage of living space. The authorities tightly control the zoning process to limit high-rise apartment buildings. Various explanations have been given but the one that fits the facts is that a shortage of living space buttresses the objectives of the Eugenic Protection Act.

To anyone who actually knows Japan (I have 27 years experience of on-the-spot Japan-watching), one of Fisher’s most inexplicable suggestions is that an unusually high proportion of Japanese never marry. The reality is the opposite: by their late 30s virtually all Japanese are married — and they are far more likely than Americans to stay married, at least until their children are grown. This is not to suggest absolutely everyone gets married: in fact a high proportion of the sort of English-speaking women that foreigners meet in Tokyo tend not to get married but they happen to be an extremely small minority.

The real geopolitical point here is that Fisher’s report is yet another variant on the “basket-case Japan” story. As I have repeatedly pointed out (not least in this commentary last year in the New York Times), the Japanese government for more than two decades now been promoting a view abroad of the Japanese economy as absurdly dysfunctional. This despite the fact that on key measures, not least its all-important trade figures, Japan has continued effortlessly to outperform the United States, as well as Britain, France, and Italy.

There is method in the madness. The basket case story has distracted attention from a key aspect of Japanese policy that the Washington Post – and the entire American establishment – should be focusing on: that, despite umpteen promises to open up, the Japanese market remains as closed as ever. Even more than the rest of the American press, the Post has consistently suppressed the story of Japan’s continuing mercantilism. The Post’s economic commentators moreover have outspokenly held that America’s loss of its manufacturing base is not a problem, despite the fact that thanks to offshoring the U.S. trade deficits have gone from the merely seriously in the 1980s to the totally disastrous in recent years.

This is where Jeff Bezos comes in. He is the Washington Post’s new owner, and, as a man with an exceptional eye for quality, he needs to conduct a top-to-bottom review of the paper’s service to the nation. He presumably wants his ownership of the Post to stand as an enduring credit to him. The fact is that the American policy-making process has been singularly badly served by the Post‘s misrepresentations of global economics (its support for financial deregulation, for instance, and its erstwhile near deification of Alan Greenspan). The United States is in the late stages of the most extraordinary economic implosion of any significant nation in history, yet the key reasons have never been properly explained to the American public. The blame is shared widely among the American media. But when the final history of what happened is written, probably no media organization will have more to answer for than the Washington Post.

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